“Oh dear!  I guess I am lost!”

CHAPTER IV

SQUINTY GETS HOME

The rows of corn, in the field where Squinty the comical pig was lost, were like the streets of a city.  They were very straight and even, just like the street where your house is, and, if you liked, you could pretend that each hill of corn was a house.

Perhaps Squinty pretended this, if pigs ever do pretend.  At any rate the little lost pig wandered up and down in the rows of corn, peering this way and that, to see which way to go so he could get home again.  He began to think that running away was not so much fun as he had at first thought.

“Oh dear!” Squinty grunted, in his funny, squealing voice.  “I wonder if I’ll ever see my mamma and papa again?”

Squinty ran this way and that up and down the rows of corn, and you can easily imagine what happened.  He soon became very tired.  “I think I will take a rest,” thought Squinty, talking to himself, because there was no one else to whom he could speak.  I think the little pig would have been very glad, just then, to speak even to Don, the dog.  But Don was not there.

Squinty, wondering what happened to little pigs when they were lost, and if they ever got home again, stretched out on the dirt between two rows of corn.  It was shady there, but over-head the hot sun was shining.  Squinty’s breath came very fast, just as when a dog runs far on a warm day.

But the earth was rather cool, and Squinty liked it.  He would much rather have been down by the cool brook, but he knew he could not have a swim in it until he found it.  And, just now, he seemed a good way off from it.

Poor Squinty!  It was bad enough to be tired and warm, but to be lost was worse, and to be hungry was worse than all—­especially to a little pig.  And, more than this, there was nothing to eat.

Squinty had tried to nibble at some of the green corn stalks, but he did not like the taste of them.  Perhaps he had not yet learned to like them, for I have seen older pigs eat corn stalks.  And pigs are very fond of the yellow corn itself.  They love to gnaw it off the cob, and chew it, just as you chew popcorn.

But the corn was not yet ripe, and Squinty was too little to have eaten it, if it had been ripe.  Later on he would learn to do this.  Just now he cared more about finding his way home, and also finding something that he could eat.

For some time the little lost pig rested on the cool earth, in the shade of the rows of corn.  Then he got up with a grunt and a squeal, and began rooting in the ground.

“Perhaps I may find some potatoes, or some pig weed, here,” thought Squinty.  “Who knows?”

But all he could root up, with his queer, rubbery nose, was some round stones.  Some of these were brown, and looked so much like the little potatoes, that Squinty tried to chew one.  But when he felt the hard stone on his little white teeth he cried out in pain.